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Channeling Noir, Dickens-Style

Last year “Tree of Smoke,” a sweeping novel by Denis Johnson, below, about the Vietnam War, won the National Book Award for fiction, and this year it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But Mr. Johnson is not resting easy. Beginning with its July issue, which arrives at newsstands on Friday, Playboy will publish his next novel, “Nobody Move,” in four monthly installments of 10,000 words each, to be written on deadline each month through the October issue. The magazine described “Nobody Move” as a hard-boiled noir in the style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but Mr. Johnson said he was also inspired by an earlier writer. “I’ve always admired Charles Dickens, who wrote big, involved novels in monthly installments,” he said in a statement, “and I wanted to find out what it was like. It’s a little nerve-racking.”